President Trump accelerated his retaliatory purge of public servants by firing the State Department’s inspector general, who had played a minor role in the president’s impeachment proceedings and was said to have begun investigating alleged misconduct by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Acting on Pompeo’s recommendation, Trump abruptly terminated Steve A. Linick late Friday night, again challenging established norms of American governance in his push to rid the federal bureaucracy of officials he considers insufficiently loyal to or protective of him and his administration. Trump replaced Linick with Stephen J. Akard, a trusted ally of Vice President Pence and the diplomat who directs the Office of Foreign Missions. He also replaced the acting inspector general at the Department of Transportation on Friday night.
Inspectors general serve as internal government watchdogs conducting oversight of federal agencies — and although they technically are political appointees, their independence has long been protected. Trump’s move — his fourth such firing during the coronavirus pandemic — drew swift condemnations from Democrats and at least one Republican on Capitol Hill.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) decried what she termed a “dangerous pattern of retaliation against the patriotic public servants charged with conducting oversight on behalf of the American people.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking Democrat, Robert Menendez (N.J.), jointly launched an investigation Saturday into Linick’s firing.
“We unalterably oppose the politically-motivated firing of inspectors general and the President’s gutting of these critical positions,” Engel and Menendez wrote in a letter to the White House directing that all records related to Linick’s ouster be preserved and turned over to their committees.
Officials at the White House and the State Department did not detail the reasons for Linick’s dismissal or address the criticisms from Democrats.
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said, “Secretary Pompeo recommended the move, and President Trump agreed.” Another U.S. official confirmed that Pompeo supported Linick’s firing in discussions with Trump.
Trump wrote in a letter to Pelosi sent Friday night, “It is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as Inspectors General. That is no longer the case with regard to this Inspector General.”
Linick had served as inspector general since 2013, when he was appointed by President Barack Obama. A former assistant U.S. attorney and career government official, Linick also served in the Justice Department as a senior anti-fraud official and as inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency before his appointment to the State Department.
Some of Linick’s recent investigations have been critical of the State Department’s management and caused consternation among Trump’s political appointees there. He has been perceived as a persistent thorn in the side of the administration under Pompeo.
Engel and Menendez wrote in their letter Saturday to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that if Linick’s firing had been designed to protect Pompeo from personal accountability, it may have been “an illegal act of retaliation.”
A Pompeo spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
Questions also have been raised about the State Department’s response to the pandemic, which would fall under the inspector general’s purview.
Linick’s firing is the latest in a series of moves by Trump since the Senate voted in February to acquit him in his impeachment trial. The president has vowed repeatedly to destroy what he calls the “deep state” by removing government officials he believes conspired against him in the impeachment proceedings or are otherwise disloyal.
Although other State Department officials played far more prominent roles in the impeachment inquiry, Linick last October provided congressional investigators with a packet of internal documents containing unproven claims about former vice president Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani said at the time that he had been responsible for sending some of those materials to the State Department.
In recent weeks, Trump has ousted three other internal government watchdogs. The president fired the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who had handled the explosive whistleblower complaint that led to his impeachment.
The president lashed out publicly at Grimm, whose office detailed “severe shortages” of testing kits, delays in receiving test results and “widespread shortages” of masks and other protective equipment at U.S. hospitals.
Trump also made a change at the Department of Transportation. On Friday night, the White House named Howard “Skip” Elliott, the administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, to serve as the department’s acting inspector general, department spokesman Andy Post confirmed. Elliott will continue to serve as leader of the pipleline agency under a dual-hat arrangement, Post said. He previously worked in the freight railroad industry for 40 years, most recently as an executive at CSX Transportation.
The previous inspector general, Calvin L. Scovel III, retired in January after 13 years in the job, following a prostate cancer diagnosis. His deputy, Mitch Behm, had been serving as acting inspector general and will return to the deputy inspector general job, Post said.
Also on Friday, the White House said it was nominating Eric J. Soskin, a Justice Department attorney, to serve as the Department of Transportation’s permanent inspector general.
There is no modern precedent for so many firings of inspectors general in such a compressed time period. Obama fired one inspector general, citing job performance issues. President Ronald Reagan tried to remove several but reversed himself after aides told him that watchdogs are not political appointees in the traditional sense.
“Some people are scared. Others are outraged. We all recognize how bad this is for our country,” one inspector general said in describing the reaction of Obama and Trump appointees alike. This official, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid without fear of retribution.
For weeks, inspectors general said they have had urgent conversations among themselves about how to continue doing their jobs in the Trump administration without compromising their principles or going easy on the subjects of their probes.
“Things are taking a very dark turn,” said a second inspector general.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who heads the council of 74 federal inspectors general, declined to comment Saturday.
Walter Shaub, who resigned as director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics six months into Trump’s presidency after clashing with the new administration, said he has been alarmed by Trump’s efforts this spring to remove “anybody who could protest or expose or investigate his corruption.”
“During the pandemic, he knows Americans are distracted with the simple tasks of staying alive and feeding their families,” Shaub said. “Times of crisis are very dangerous for anti-corruption efforts and very dangerous for democracy because leaders use them to justify power grabs. I think that’s what’s happening here.”
At the State Department and other large agencies, inspectors general do not have fixed terms once they are confirmed by the Senate. Although they serve at the pleasure of the president, they have not traditionally been treated as political appointees and therefore occupy a murky space in the bureaucracy.
Some State Department officials have questioned the slow speed of inquiries conducted by Linick, and the lack of investigation into the treatment of Yovanovitch, the career ambassador who Trump fired last year.
But many of the office’s probes have been sharply critical. An August 2019 report concluded that the leadership of the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs mistreated and harassed staffers, accused them of political disloyalty to the Trump administration and retaliated against them.
Career staffers who had held their jobs in the previous administration were referred to as “Obama holdovers,” “traitors” and members of the “Deep State” that Trump has long accused of using the bureaucracy to thwart his policies, according to the report.
A second report, issued last November, found that a civil service employee relieved of her job as an expert on Iran and the Persian Gulf in the office of policy planning had been targeted in part because she was of Iranian descent, as well as for her work during the Obama administration — including on the Iran nuclear deal — and rumors that she had shed tears at Trump’s election.
In January, an inspector general investigation of the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki found that Trump-appointed Ambassador Robert Pence, and the career Foreign Service officer who served as second-in-command, “did not manage conflict between them in an appropriate manner, which resulted in a breakdown of trust and communication that complicated the chain of command and contributed to a stressful work environment” for staff. Pence, a Virginia real estate developer and Republican donor, has no relation to the vice president.
